Berkeley Rep to start with 'Courage'

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, April 5, 2006

Two adventuresome new musicals and the West Coast premiere of Martin McDonagh's unsettling "The Pillowman" are among the highlights of Berkeley Repertory Theatre's new season, announced today by Artistic Director Tony Taccone. The comedy "All Wear Bowlers," Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage" and inventive composer Paul Dresher's interpretation of Virginia Woolf's "To the Lighthouse" are featured in the season that opens in September.

"I think Berkeley Rep is one of the few theaters in the nation that can use a word like progressive and have it mean something," Taccone said. "We're trying to create work that has both a topicality and a timelessness. I know that sounds contradictory, but I think that's a contradiction I like."

The 39th season -- Taccone's 19th with the Rep and his 10th as artistic director -- covers those bases and demonstrates what he promises will be an increased commitment to developing new work. Of the six plays announced (a seventh will be named later), two are world premieres and only one is a classic. "Mother Courage," which opens the season Sept. 13, is as topical as it is timeless.

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"It's a play that happens in the middle of the Thirty Years War," Taccone says of the tragedy of a woman who survives by selling goods to the troops and fails to protect her grown children from the war. "It's a really complicated and fascinating look at the psychology of somebody who has to survive dire times. And I think, for all kinds of obvious reasons, the play is phenomenally and unfortunately relevant to right now."

"Courage," directed by Lisa Peterson, will be staged in a recent translation by English playwright David Hare ("a political thinker of the first order," Taccone says), whose "Stuff Happens," about the war in Iraq, is playing at New York's Public Theater. It will have new settings of Brecht's songs by Gina Leishman, whom Taccone thinks is a perfect match for Brecht's humor. "She loves irony, and Brecht did nothing that wasn't ironic."

The first of the two new musicals, "Passing Strange" by the singer-songwriter named Stew, opens in October, in a world premiere co-production with the Public Theater. It's an autobiographical tale about an African American man who leaves Los Angeles for Europe to escape racism, and finds a different sort of racial objectification. Stew, formerly of the band the Negro Problem, combines "very sophisticated lyrics, a la Elvis Costello," Taccone says, "with the musical sophistication of Ornette Coleman and the melodic hummability of Van Morrison. It's very infectious."

Geoff Sobelle and Trey Lyford's "All Wear Bowlers," the holiday offering, is an international hit that combines silent film comedy and an homage to Laurel and Hardy with "a kind of postmodern exploration of Beckett," Taccone says. "Very funny, very smart." McDonagh's "Pillowman," directed by Associate Artistic Director Les Waters, follows in January. A sensation in London and New York, the play takes a murder interrogation into ever more gruesome territory.

"This guy's sort of amazing," Taccone says of the author of "The Beauty Queen of Leenane." He attributes McDonagh's success to combining "macabre story lines with a hilarious sense of humor" in a way that takes daily media reports of "pedophilia and serial killings and abductions" and "makes them survivable."

Woolf's "To the Lighthouse," adapted by Adele Shank, follows in February, also directed by Waters. Composer Dresher, Taccone believes, is well-suited to Woolf's sensibility. "Paul is one of those people who can articulate, in a very sophisticated way, very complicated ideas."

Actor Delroy Lindo, familiar from Spike Lee's movies, directs the sixth play, "The Blue Door" by Tanya Barfield ("a wonderful young writer," Taccone says). A search for self-identity, the play traces an African American mathematics professor's confrontations with his ancestors during a sleepless night after his white wife has left him "because he isn't black enough. ... It's a very theatrically explosive play," Taccone says, that traces the legacy of black Americans "from one kind of slavery to another kind of definition of self that is encumbered" by the past.

"Life is complicated," Taccone says of his vision of the Rep as a progressive theater. "I'm not interested in a kind of simplistic left institution where we say, 'Boy, is America wrong.' That's not helpful. And not true. America, like every other place in the world, is right and wrong about a lot of things. ... We feel free to both celebrate and criticize."

Subscriptions to the Rep's season, available in several formats, are on sale at (510) 647-2949 or at www.berkeleyrep.org.